Sunday, July 9, 2017

The announcement that Kmart and Sears will be closing another 43 stores was no big surprise — more retail stores have closed in the United States this year than any year ever — but hidden in the details there was another trend that might surprise some. The company as it shrinks is planning on not just fewer stores, but also smaller stores. Many stores, that is, will be shrinking in place. I saw that happen a few years ago when a mall Sears store was reduced to one floor. That location has since closed completely, but Sears indicates that we can expect to see more stores that keep the same main entrances but have less space inside. Stores are simply too large and complicated for shoppers to figure out. After a century of ever-increasing retail space, are we ready for smaller, more focused stores? My guess is that we are.

Monday, July 3, 2017

If what I am seeing in advertising is any indication, hot dogs have completed the transition to a one-day-a-year food for most of the people who eat them. Brands that haven’t advertised all year have been in saturation mode for the past six days in an attempt to get their share of this year’s hot dog market. It is a surprisingly fast transition in cultural terms. I can easily remember when I ate hot dogs regularly, sometimes five days in a row until the package was empty. A sharp price increase broke that pattern for me, and many other consumers were dissuaded by a series of manufacturing scandals. I no longer buy hot dogs at all, and I haven’t seen one since last summer. Hot dogs have become a gimmick. No one would consider them a practical thing to eat, but they symbolize the Independence Day holiday more than any other food item. Hot dog manufacturers in the recent advertising emphasize that hot dogs have been improved this year. I feel certain the improvements are greatly exaggerated, but regardless of any number of minor changes, hot dogs are not the easiest form of food to handle safely. Given that, there is a serious problem with eating them so infrequently. Eaters are relatively likely to find that they can’t stomach a couple of hot dogs this time around. The bad experiences make people vow to eat even fewer hot dogs, and that, in turn, makes stomach distress even more likely next time around. What is needed to save the hot dog from this downward spiral is a new kind of hot dog, one that turns the tradition on its head. The traditional hot dog was made from the worst scraps of meat — a mix of brains, skin, and internal organs that was too awful to be used in any other way. This was cheapened still more a quarter of a century ago by mixing in such extras as soy protein isolate, gum, concentrated wood smoke, and chemicals. What’s needed now is a hot dog that is designed first and foremost not to make anyone sick — made with no meat at all, no soy, no chemicals or wheat gluten. I’m not sure exactly what it would be made of, but it is surely not too much to ask. The physical form of a hot dog is so nondescript — just a tube shape filled with goop hardened by cooking until it is just barely solid — and the flavor so nonspecific, there must be fifty ways to make them that don’t lean on high-risk ingredients at all. An exact flavor match is not necessary — indeed, the new hot dogs will need to look, smell, and taste different enough that the people who got sick on the hot dogs of 2017 can be persuaded to try again in a future year. Such is the ritual importance of the hot dog on the 4th of July and so great is the risk of annually eating the current output of the hot dog factories that this hot dog redesign is almost inevitable.